


Imbalance

by orphan_account



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 06:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Coming to terms with her freshly finalized divorce, Alice Cooper (no, it’s Smith) is having some trouble getting past her inner demons. That is, until Betty decides to give her a push in what she deems the ‘right direction’... straight into her Southside past. (Warning: the beginning is pretty depressing, but it gets fluffy. I promise.)





	Imbalance

Alice woke up angry.

It would seem, to an outsider, entirely baseless when she nearly growled in exasperation, making a fist with her left hand and allowing the crescent-shaped imprints to ground her in pain. The other raked through her hair, shaking the pins loose, lending it a wild look to match her raging thoughts.

The light streaming in from the picture window, unabated by lacy, too-sheer curtains, only annoyed her more. It felt too cheery, as if the mood of the world refused to match hers, every little thing somehow contradictory to her point of view. She squinted against the brightness until the intense titian color faded into more manageable hues, the room awash in the different shades of amber and gold that came with what some would call a perfect sunrise.

There would seem to be no reason for Alice’s distress, if there were someone looking on - the truth was all too different.

Every morning that she woke to an empty bed, it haunted her. Hurt her more. While she was confident in the knowledge that it had been the right decision to cut the toxic mess that her husband had come to represent from her life, the cold specter of loneliness was already beginning to catch up with her. It showed itself most prevalently in the form of chilled sheets and mood swings, wrapping her in a sense of dread and self-doubt. She only felt anger, raw, true anger, on a good day.

It wasn’t often that frustration and optimism went hand in hand, but with her they were one and the same. Fury drove her, gave her a passion and focus that little else could and put a sense of fire into her articles. So, although her heart beat quick, although her steps were stilted as she threw the covers off and moved toward the ensuite, Alice treasured it, let it shape her.

Coming to a stop in front of the mirror, she was met with features of hardened stone. An intimidatingly cool disposition, one she was intimately familiar with, that she prided herself on. Her hair was up, and she met her own eyes, able to see the emotion written there where no-one else would register it. The only evidence that she was human at all came in the gentle arch of her eyebrow, conveying a subtle disgust with the state of the world at large.

She’d stopped being offended by the nickname “ice queen” long ago. It really did fit.

“Damn,” she swore to herself, breaking the eye contact with her reflection and instead casting her gaze to the sink. Her hands splayed out on either side, contacting the cool marble harshly as she leaned against it for a kind of support. The heat abandoned her as quickly as it had come, leaving a freezing emptiness in its wake, and it was like the strength just seeped from her, despite the confidence she wanted, needed to have. She and Hal, despite whatever problems they may have had, had been a united front; Alice could almost always count on him to back her up, and now she stood alone, independent of everything.

It hadn’t even been a week yet. How was she expected to cope with this for what could be the rest of her life?

She could do it. Of course she could. And she would. But a job meant for two had now become carried by only one, and she found the prospect a daunting one. Her infallible composure seemed to be cracking from the inside out.

She would not cry.

It felt like his absence was almost breaking her. She felt like glass - beautiful, but more fragile than anything… ever so easy to shatter. The idea of it, of how flimsy she was, irked her greatly. Alice Cooper (no, Smith. It’s been twenty odd years since she’s answered to that name but damn if she won’t wear it with pride now,) did not like to appear weak by any stretch of the imagination, but her hands shook when performing the most basic tasks now for fear of getting something trivial wrong.

She didn’t want Hal in any capacity, but she needed him.

She needed him to balance her.

Tears dripped into the basin of the sink, breaking promises in the mere act of existence. A feeling of inferiority settled over her, even though she knew she’d been the one to take the initiative in the continuous power struggle they were locked in. It was all they said about her now; she’d heard the whispers.

_“Have you heard? Her own husband isn’t even willing to stay with her anymore. That man tried so hard to put up with her...”_

_“She’s gone insane, hasn’t she? Finally lost it. A shame.”_

_“Poor Alice. I always said she’d become an alcoholic sooner than she’d keep a family together.”_

The last wasn’t entirely far off. Hal’s liquor cabinet, while she’d never seen a need to touch it when he’d been in the house, was certainly less full than it had been. Before wine had been enough to get her through; now, it had become whiskey, vodka sometimes. Alcohol numbed feeling, made pain lesser, and sometimes she simply couldn’t stand the white-hot guilt licking at her in the dead of night.

She’d stopped going to work, instead preferring to write at home, and rarely dressed anymore. There didn’t seem any point. It was like she was floating, unmoored, still doing her job but lacking the will to do it to the best of her ability. Hal had ripped a hole in her life, once a perfect tapestry but now torn apart at the seams. This wasn’t natural decay. It was orchestrated, and it dug deep.

Giving a heavy, beleaguered sigh, Alice turned the handle for cold water, splashing it onto her face in the hopes that it would revive her, wake her up from the constant stupor she seemed to be in. It mingled with her tears, washing the evidence of them away, leaving a clean slate and shocking her system into action.

She need only appear put together until Betty left for school. At that point, the day was hers.

Mechanically, she pulled her makeup bag from the cabinet to the side, going through the motions; brows, cheeks, lips. Yet another piece to her mask, her facade, sliding in place with every product she used. This was familiar, very much so, and that relaxed the pounding of her heart. Although Alice was no stranger to cracks in her composure, breaking down into tears upon consciousness, all due to the simple act of looking at herself in the mirror, was a new low for her. She resented this flaw of hers, the ugly inability to keep her emotions reined in when she needed to the most.

Giving herself a critical once-over, the blonde deemed her nightclothes to be enough for now. She didn’t have the energy to change in any case. It usually comforted her to seal herself into a skirt suit, giving her a sense of authority and power, but now it seemed crass, fake, just like the rest of her daily routine.

Everything in her life felt plastic.

AFAFAFAF

Much like a dream, Alice’s reality was blurred at the edges as she padded through her family’s home, once her perfect idea of a house in the naïveté of childhood. The paintings lining the halls, the floral wallpapers, the pastel carpeting, all contributed to that same feeling of false perfection, as if she’d been thrust into the life of a woman who existed only on the pages of scripts or silver screens. The lack of lucidity should have been troubling, but her mind was elsewhere, distracted.

Betty had beaten her downstairs, something that never happened on a normal day, but the younger blonde was unbothered. She was absorbed in a conversation with Veronica as usual, her pale pink nails making gentle clicks as they connected with her phone’s screen. She glanced up for only a moment to acknowledge her mother, giving her the bare minimum of respect before returning to her own world as she balanced her phone on one of the many cooking magazines that adorned the dining table.

“Good morning,” she mumbled, half-hearted and uninterested. Her lips curled into a mischievous smirk in response to something she’d read, and it clearly wasn’t something that bore reply.

Alice breathed an unnoticeable sigh of relief, nodding once, and headed into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. The less Betty looked at her, analyzed her, the better. Already, a fear was swelling within her that her daughter would see right through the carefully constructed lie she’d created, the illusion of unaffectedness, just like Alice herself was so known for being able to do. It was her job to peel back that velvet curtain on others’ lives, and yet admitting those very same failings got more difficult by the day. The passion for uncovering secrets and half-truths was a trait Betty had clearly inherited; it seemed to run in their family.

“Pancakes or waffles,” she called, trying to keep her voice upbeat, but a bland, monotone quality overtook it instead. She would do it all, play the perfect mother for as long as she had to, but to say she was able to do it happily was a far cry from the truth.

“I can eat at school, mom,” Betty responded, an odd softness to her tone, and it brought pause to Alice’s movements as she set the pot to brew. She identified a kind of concern in the dulcet nature of the teen’s words, and it sent a pulse of adrenaline through her body. A fear, animalistic and brutal, that she couldn’t even admit to herself, let alone face, simply from the thought that her own daughter might know enough about her to sense that something was off.

So the question, then, became a simple one…

What on earth did Elizabeth think she knew?

“Of course,” she conceded, but her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, and she turned to the countertop to conceal it. Her pale fingertips contacted the marble with tentativity, an uncertainty that was so incredibly unlike her that even she noticed it. The veins stood out prominently against her paper white skin, a regal blue color thundering through her in the form of blood. Somehow, the thought calmed her; no matter what happened on the outside, her body would continue to complete these basic tasks to keep her alive, and she didn’t have to do anything to aid it. A semblance of color came back to her cheeks with the reminder that she was, in fact, only human, and no woman should be expected to deal with a divorce under circumstances like these and still be positive, _normal_ , one hundred percent of the time.

But, as she came to this realization, her daughter came to another, just across the dining table, slowly putting her pastel pink phone into the back pocket of her jeans with a worried glance at her mother. Whatever Veronica had to say next could wait: it was clear to her now that something wasn’t right, and she was bound by her own curiosity to figure out what it was. The tension in the room grew hot, her eyes probing Alice’s back for some sort of clue, the elder blonde’s state clearly evidenced by the robe and pajama set she still wore. Betty’s expressive eyes filled with concern and her eyebrows knit together, both from a want to solve the puzzle Alice currently presented and a worry that the woman was not faring as well as she let on. It had been her priority to not show Betty how the divorce was affecting her, and the youngest Cooper did know that; she could easily tell. One thing her mother did not do was overestimate her…

But Betty was almost positive, in this very moment, that signing her name on those papers had been about as damaging to Alice as it would have if she’d been asked to take a blood oath. She’d sensed the building pain in the older woman since things had been finalized, made official, and she likened it to the pain she had felt that terrible night at the beginning of sophomore year when Archie Andrews had told her he would never be good enough.

Her mother’s issue was different, though. It wasn’t that her prospective partner was worried about her too much.

It was that he didn’t, and never had, cared about her at all.

She’d been the one to tell Alice about Hal’s adultery - the crimes he committed with Penelope Blossom when he thought nobody was watching. Betty almost regretted that… it had torn her family apart, after all, but she was sure that, with time, this would make her mother happier. Even if it caused her pain now, living with a man who didn’t give her what she needed wasn’t something that was good for either of them. Around Hal, Alice was irritable, uncompromising, altogether difficult. But without him, she was at the very least _trying_ to be a good mother: not immediately yielding to the will of someone else, finally trusting her own decisions as a parent. And, for the most part, it was paying off. Betty could see a future in which her family was happy. Her and Chic and Alice, a tightly knit household, stronger together than apart. But she could only see it with Hal out of the picture entirely.

Right now, at least by Betty’s assessment, her mother needed to get over Hal Cooper. Even if the love between them had faded, they’d always been there for one another to some degree… even right up until the end. She understood why Alice wouldn’t be able to let that feeling go so easily. Well, not without a little push, anyway…

Retrieving her phone again, Betty smirked to herself as she pulled up her last conversation with Jughead, a plan quickly forming in her mind. She knew it wasn’t her place, but that had truly never stopped Alice before, and she wouldn’t let it stop her now. The elder blonde needed a distraction, something to cheer her up… and Betty knew just what that distraction could be.

In decidedly better spirits, she pushed back from the table, grabbing her backpack from its hook by the door and confirming her plans with a final text.

“I’m walking to school with Jug today, is that okay?”

“Just be safe, it’s slippery out there.”

About to head out the door, Betty glanced back one last time, regarding her mother for a moment, taking in the defeat that slumped her posture once more and barely withholding a sigh to witness it.

“Hey Mom… I love you,” she said, making sure it didn’t sound like an afterthought, and gave a genuine smile as the woman looked up at her in something like shock. It had been too long since they’d said those words, and more than that, they didn’t come often enough. Especially now.

“I love you too, sweetheart,” Alice responded, and though she still looked tired, Betty thought some of the weight on her shoulders seemed to have lifted. She stood just that bit taller, and it gave the younger blonde just the confidence she needed to go through with her fledgeling plan, no matter how insane it was. Nodding once, she turned on her heel, stepping out into the snow with a fresh outlook.

This would be a day of change. Important change. Change that needed to be made.

Today, she would make sure her mother really smiled, even if it was the last thing she did.

 

**Author's Note:**

> See, the thing is, I really do not ship Bughead. But for this plot to work, that’s what has to happen. So, I suppose this will just be me stepping a little outside my comfort zone to push my writing boundaries. 
> 
> Wish me luck. :)


End file.
